


Things that remain

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 09:46:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16784509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: It was funny, Vex thought; when she was always travelling, always on the road, she had known where all her things were. Here in Whitestone, she had a real home of her own for the first time in decades, and things kept turning up in unexpected places.





	Things that remain

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for descriptions of wounds/badly-done medical procedures/possible gross stuff.

There were many rooms in Whitestone Castle, and this one was nothing special; just a storage room at the end of one of the back corridors, hidden from the main rooms of the house. It was funny, Vex thought; when she was always travelling, always on the road, she had known where all her things were. Here in Whitestone, she had a real home of her own for the first time in decades, and things kept turning up in unexpected places.

But there was a heavy wooden chest there that held old things, simple relics from a bygone age. Not magical ones, or not in the way that Vex had become used to speaking of magic. Old things, worn things. Possessions that had belonged to the person she had used to be, that had somehow persisted into her new life.

Vex didn’t have many possessions left over from their days with Vox Machina, and even fewer from earlier – they didn’t have much, when it was just the two of them on the road. If something broke, or tore, and they couldn’t repair it then there was no reason to carry it with them. Vax had been more given to carry keepsakes than she had, but even those were only small things, ones that could fit in a pocket but held meaning to him.

There weren’t very many of their old clothes left. But there were a few; an old shirt that had originally been Vax’s, she thought as she opened the wooden chest. A pair of leather gloves that Vex had been ripped off for when she was a young girl and resolved to keep forever to get her money’s worth; she had been angry about that, at the time, angry at herself. a cloak that Trinket had used a blanket when he was a baby, and chewed on the hem of until it frayed.

Sitting by the heavy wooden chest, she pulled out the shirt from underneath it all, rumpling the other clothes folded above it. She felt her eyes sting as she held it to her face; it didn’t smell of him. She was not expecting it to, of course; it had not been his in years, and anyway, the servants here put little muslin bags of lavender and pine in between the stored and folded clothes, to keep the moths away. It smelled of that, mostly, and the fabric felt cold against her skin.

But it brought back memories. The coarse linen was softened by years of the two of them washing it against harsh rocks in cold river water, on the road together. And so she noticed when her fingers caught a slight roughness, an irregularity in the weave. A little row of stitches, neat and precise.

She pressed her eyes closed as she ran her fingertips over them; she recognised them as Vax’s immediately. She remembered their mother teaching them to mend their clothes; they had both been good at it, but Vax’s stitches had always been smaller, neater, the fabric less likely to ruch when he pulled them taut. Telling apart people’s stitches was even easier than recognising handwriting, she and Vax had once tried to explain to a bemused Keyleth.

Their mother had taught them that. Their mother, who had made enough money to raise the twins and keep them warm and fed by making clothes for people of the middling class of nobles, the sort who lived in small keeps and owed fealty to much more powerful families like the de Rolos. It was odd, thinking about that from the perspective of the life she lived now.

That had been before their father had sent for them, though. Afterwards, nothing was ever the same. After coming back to find nothing left but ashes, they had clung to each other, certain that there would never be colour in the world again.

Vex remembered nights on the road, ingrained into her mind by much repetition. When they were away from a town it usually went the same way: Vax would build a fire, while Vex would hunt some animal to cook on it. If she managed to catch something they would cook it together, and eat together, licking the grease from their fingers, and scrub their hands and their knives in icy river water afterwards.

As it grew dark, they would sit in the light of the dying fire, and they would mend their clothes or gear with slow care. They would talk, sometimes, and sometimes they would sit in silence that didn’t need filling with any words as the embers burned down.

She ran her fingers over the stitched tear in the sleeve of the shirt, trying to remember what had made this hole in the cloth. Perhaps a knife cut, given how sharp and straight it was; sometimes they fought bandits on the road, those looking to steal from two children – well, they hadn’t been children exactly, but they hadn’t been adults either – travelling alone. They had seemed like easy targets, then, she knew, and Vax had hated that exactly as much as Vex had.

They hadn’t grown strong yet, then. Once they had been robbed, and a dagger had been at Vax’s throat. Vex had struggled, kicking and shouting in fury, until she had seen that. Then she had frozen up, as a large hand slipped down her side to the belt pouch where she kept their money. Another hand was in her hair wrenching her head back, someone else’s pulling her arm up behind her back so hard tears came to her eyes. She was furious, desperate; that was all the money the two of them had, all they had to survive on. She wanted to struggle and fight, to run away from the unyielding hands that held her in place. But all she saw was the glint of the light on the metal at her brother’s throat, the knowledge that it had only to move a little way to spill his blood pressing in at her, rooting her to the spot.

Vax had not held still, though; he had been frozen for only a moment, trembling with fear or anger or both.

She had felt the knife come up to her side and cut the strap of the leather pouch she wore on her belt. The blade caught her skin too, going through her clothes and leaving a little, shallow cut on her hip. But Vax had snarled at the sight of even that much of her blood, baring his teeth and grasping the blade of the knife at his throat with his bare palm, ripping it away from himself with all the force his skinny arm could muster. The angle and the force must have taken the woman holding him by surprise – he always had incredible, dumb luck - because even as blood pooled on Vax’s palm, he was able to yank the knife upwards over his head and dart out, dashing forward and kicking the man holding Vex in the shins with screaming fury, all flailing wiry arms and balled fists. He went to knee the much larger man in the groin but missed, a booted foot coming out to lazily trip him, sending him sprawling to the ground.

Vex had been so afraid, then; so afraid that they would catch him and kill him for what he’d done. Instead they just laughed; a large hand picked Vax up by the scruff of his collar and dumped him on the ground next to her. They took Vex’s pouch of coins, and left the two of them behind.

When they had gone Vex had yelled at Vax in tearful anger as she looked at his bloody hand; he had yelled back, equally furious, tears spilling down his face. _I couldn’t let them do that to you! I had to do something!_

She had thrown it right back in his face. _He had a knife to your throat! What if you got killed,_ _idiot_ _? What would I do then? I can’t do this alone!_

He had cried, and she had cried. His hand was bleeding, and there was more blood, she suddenly realised, than either of them had thought. He had screamed a little in pain as – not knowing what else to do – she had marched him to the side of the river and dunked his hand in to clean the gash, his blood sluicing away in the cold, rushing water. He had bitten his lip to muffle his messy, hitching sobs as she had stitched his cut.

She did a bad job; she remembered thinking it even then. Vex had only sewn small wounds before, and her heart was like a trapped bird in her ribcage the whole time as the frozen fear from their encounter with the bandits refused to leave her. It was a large, deep wound, from the ball of his thumb to the base of his little finger, the flesh slippery with blood and water, and both their hands were trembling badly. She remembered thinking that their mother wouldn’t be proud of her stitches, if she could see.

Still, Vex had wrapped her brother’s hand as best she could, with a none-too-clean strip of cloth torn from the hem of her tunic. In the night, though, he bled through the bandages, and when she took them off the hand had swollen red and shiny. She had laid a concerned hand against his forehead to find it warm, his eyes darting and a little unfocused. He had told her he was fine, to stop worrying about him.

By the next morning, Vax was gritting his teeth with pain, his temperature rising by the hour. He could barely walk without stumbling, his feet dragging, and she insisted they stop despite his protests. He held his hand to his chest, cradling it like an animal whose paw had been caught in a hunter’s trap, the muscles in his face all taut with suppressed pain.

By the time the second night came his whole hand was a terrible greyish pink and swollen, straining against the stitches. Vax was burning with fever, whimpering and drenched in cold sweat as he drifted in and out of consciousness. All Vex could do was hold him and try to keep the fire going; she had been afraid to leave him, so she fed him what little dried food they had. She ate nothing herself; she was too nervous, sitting paralysed with fear at Vax’s side, and besides, the smell of infection turned her stomach. And so she just sat there trembling with fear as she watched the fever burn through him, sweat sticking his hair to his brow even in the cold night air.

They were miles from any town. She didn’t think she could carry Vax, but he needed a healer badly. Not that she had any money to pay for one; their money had all been stolen. That was her fault too, she thought. _Stupid._ She was so stupid, for freezing like that; she should have fought harder, should have thrown herself in front of them, rather than Vax.

_Or not_. She thought, on balance, that she wouldn’t want this for him, seeing her burn up like this. He had always coped worse with the darkness, with being alone, than she had. She didn’t want this for him, not then, not ever. She had looked down at his face; his lashes were clumped together with tears, or sweat, and she could see his eyes moving in little erratic twitches beneath his lids. She had wondered what he was dreaming about. His face burned to the touch; she wondered if he was seeing fire, behind his eyes, fire that would burn through him leaving only an ashy husk in its wake, like the dragon fire that had consumed their home.

He spoke, sometimes, whimpering and crying out as he dreamed. A few times, he called out for their mother, and Vex didn’t have the heart to tell him no, it was only her. She might as well have done this to him, and she had no idea how to fix it; she was not like their mother, but just a frightened girl, so desperately afraid of being left alone.

It was funny to think it, now, but Vex supposed it had been one of the worst nights of her life either before or since. She had never been a patient person, never good at waiting. Her eyes had itched with tiredness, but she didn’t sleep for many hours. She merely sat there holding Vax’s hand very tightly, desperately afraid that if she let herself sleep he wouldn’t be there when she woke up.

Still, at some point she must have been claimed by exhaustion, because when she awoke it was midmorning, and she was lying half across Vax, who was moving slightly under her. Vex jolted awake in panic, blinking in the bright light and scrubbing at her eyes as she stared down at him; his eyes were beginning to flicker open too, his mouth cracking open a little with a tiny, breathy sound of pain. Carefully, she opened her water skin and tried to carefully pour some into his lips. His skin, she noted with great relief, wasn’t burning hot anymore. His fever must have broken in the night.

She had given him the water to drink too fast, and he coughed a little, until the water came out of his nose. He whined, coughs blending into a reflexive giggle, as he grasped weakly at her arm with his good hand. “H-hey Stubby…” he rasped. His eyes – red-rimmed, but thankfully more focussed than they had been the night before – took in her face, and he frowned. “Well that was…not our best night ever, huh?”

She couldn’t help but laugh too, nervously, sweeping the hair back from his brow and helping him to sit up and just holding him tightly. “Yeah. Yes, I’d say we’ve had better.”

Vax understood, she thought. He must have imagined, in that moment, what she had gone through that night, and understood. He was still pitifully weak, but he held her close too, until she had drawn away to fuss over his hand and change the stained bandages as best she could.

They had gotten to a town, eventually. Vax had been wan and grey-faced, and his palm a mess of pus and split flesh stretched too tight across ragged stitches. But they had begged a kindly apothecary to tend to him, in exchange for Vex working in the shop for a month, and Vax too once he had recovered.

That was where she had learned her first healing spell, and though it wasn’t very much – certainly nothing compared to what she would learn later – it was a comfort to have, and it felt like security to be able to draw that power from the air with nothing but her will. They had stayed there a little longer, until they had made back a little money. And Vex had sworn to herself then, that nothing like that would ever happen again. She wouldn’t let it.

Then they had left, slipping away in the night to wherever the road took them next, and that was that. But for all the years after, Vax’s palm still had a faint silver scar across it, the messy stitches done by the panicked young girl she’d been still visible, etched into his flesh permanently.

In the present, Vex remembered this as she pressed the old shirt between her hands. There were other days, other bad moments, other wounds that needed suturing. She got better at it, and she learned how to heal, and how to keep her head. She had learned how to avoid freezing, and Vax had learned – at least a little – how to avoid burning himself through.

There were other fights, other tears in their clothes and their skin and in their hearts. When the heart is hurt, Vex found out in time, it’s not that different. They were both sewn inextricably into each other’s hearts, leaving their distinctive stitches there a thousand times over.

And though he was gone, she knew that that would never change.

At that moment, Vex was shaken fully out of the past by a sound behind her, muffled by the closed door at her back. Footsteps, and a familiar voice.

“Trinket, I think you’re having me on again. Why are we looking for her _here?_ ” she heard Percy say, voice moving closer along the corridor. Vex couldn’t help but smile, as she heard Trinket’s lumbering footsteps, a snuffling sound as if in reply. Percy tutted, as something bumped against the door. “Yes, I know you’ve been with her longer than I have. But this is just a storage room, why would she be - ”

Vex turned around, as the door opened behind her, and saw Percy standing there in the doorway with Trinket nosing his way past unceremoniously. “Oh” said Percy, as he saw her kneeling there in front of the chest of old clothes, spilling its contents onto the floor. His eyes narrowed, and she saw it click into place for him - it wasn’t the first time he had found her like this, and she doubted it would be the last - connecting the tears on her face with the old shirt in her hands. “ _Oh_.”

Trinket nuzzled her arm, curling up beside her in a warm mass, beginning to chew gently on the cloak again. She leaned back against him, relaxing just a little as Percy came and sat down beside her, cross-legged on the floor. She folded the cloth again, going to turn aside and begin to tidy the contents of the chest away, but he caught her hands between them. She turned to look at him; his eyes were full of concern, and grief.

It wasn’t just her that lost a brother, after all. Nor was it the first time for him. And yet, she knew, so much of his sorrow was for her sake. He always knew when she was hurting, and every time he would do his utmost to help even if there was nothing he could do, no way he could fix this.

And just like that she was leaning forward and in Percy’s arms, her forehead pressed against his chest, gripping fistfuls of his shirt as she sobbed into the front of it, hot tears dampening the cloth.

Because Percy _kn_ _ew_ this feeling, she had realised, at some point. He understood. It always made her head spin, to think this about her husband; that he knew this pain, over and over, that he saw his family cut down or hunted one by one in front of him. She could barely imagine this compounded; she had often thought that she would break from it. She understood him better now, and she was even more grateful for his arms around her, his quiet muttered endearments into her hair.

“When does it get _better_?” she found herself sobbing. She felt as though her heart had been torn apart all over again, stitches torn out one by one, leaving bloody holes. _You can’t scar over if the wound never closed._ She swallowed, listening to Percy’s heartbeat as she laid her head against his chest. Even that, she couldn’t let herself take for granted; not when she remembered too clearly what he looked like cold and lifeless, his body torn through and bleeding on the ground. “How could you bear it?” she whispered, voice hoarse with tears. “To lose them like that.”

He knew what she meant immediately. He sighed. “For a long time, I couldn’t. Truth be told, I don’t remember that much, right after” he said. He made a tiny, regretful noise in his throat, dropping his head down onto hers. “….And you know what I became. You know what I could have become.”

“But you came back from it. And you did survive, in the end.”

He cupped her face gently, turning her head so she met his eye. “Dear, I survived for one reason. Well, two reasons” he said. “At first, I survived because Cass saved me, that night. I would have died in that cell otherwise; Ripley would have broken me, and I think in the end…I would have let her.” He stilled the protestation on her lips. “But I would never have made it this far if you hadn’t found me, in that prison. I would have broken, sooner or later, lost every part of myself to the darkness, and by then it would have been for the best. But, when you and Vax brought the others into that cell, and got me out of there, then my life changed forever. And…” he shook his head. “Vax is gone, and I can’t in good conscience tell you that will ever stop hurting. In fact, I can almost certainly tell you – from personal experience – that it never will. But… you have us. You have me, and Trinket, and Keyleth and Tary, Scanlan and Pike and Grog. You have everyone in Whitestone, and so many more people out there. Cass is your sister now too. My family is your family… you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes of course! Of course I do, darling! And I love you more than I know how to say, but…”

He closed his eyes, nodding in understanding. “…But it’s not him.”

“It’s not him.” She dropped her head, silent for a long time as he ran soothing strokes through her hair. “It…doesn’t really get better, does it.”

“Not…in the way that you mean, darling. It doesn’t get better. But…it does get easier, I’ve found. At least, most of the time…” he raised his head, looked around. “I won’t lie to you, it does… come back at you, even after so long. Even now, Whitestone is… so full of them.” He picked up the shirt in her hands, tracing the stitches with his fingers, then raising his head to look around the room as though half-expecting to see ghosts right there in the room with them. “Time won’t change that. But it does come to hurt less.”

Vex leaned forward in his arms, leaning her forehead against his shoulder again and letting out her breath. She felt worn by exhaustion, suddenly. “I know” she said. She slipped her fingers into the fabric in Percy’s hands, bunching them very tight in the folds of cloth. She could feel the slight roughness of the stitches, in the place where the sleeve had been mended, so long ago. She held on tighter, and as she felt Percy press a kiss to the crown of her head, the tears came once more, soaking into the shoulder of his waistcoat. It was different, though, from the wrenching sobs of a minute ago: it felt somehow steadying, grounding, and even the heat of the tears was like the soothing heat of fire-warmed water used to wash a wound clean. Trinket nuzzled her side, curling in closer so that the comforting, warm bulk of his was pressed to her, and her free hand found its way into his fur.

Finally she pulled back, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. She pressed her lips together in consternation, frowning at the large patch of damp of shirt and waistcoat where she had cried against Percy’s shoulder. He saw her looking, and smiled wryly. “Don’t worry. I’ve been covered in much worse things in my time… some of them even as a result of your presence in my life. Directly or indirectly.”

She gave him a sidelong look, and couldn’t help the teary snort of laughter that slipped out. “Oh, really?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter” said Percy, guileless. “I meant my everyday dusting of black powder, and the occasional splatter of monster blood and viscera, of course. Why are you laughing?”

She wiped her eyes once more, smiling now through her tears. “Oh, no reason.” She leaned forward, cupping his face. “Thank you” she said, serious suddenly. “For… being here. For… this sort of thing. I’m afraid that I’ll just… be like this, sometimes.” She gestured around the storage room with the old chests of things in them, taking in herself before dropping her hands back to the old shirt they both held wound around their joined hands. “Maybe forever.”

“It’s…understandable” he said, with a sigh. “But I meant what I said. I hope that you know… I’ll always be there with you, to help you through. For what it’s worth.”

“Oh, darling” she said, cupping his face in her hands. “I hope _you_ know it’s worth _everything_.”


End file.
